Would You Like to Be in a Band?
I wanted to be in a band ever since I was about thirteen years old - twelve, thirteen years old - because- I had a cousin, um, who's four years older than me, and in fact, in the end, I ended up playing with him in Argent. He was the bass player in Argent, Jim Rodford, and he formed one of the first bands in this area, called the Bluetones, and the Bluetones had the first electric guitar in this area, as far as I know, I mean, in, in- within about a hundred miles. Um, you know, a sort of early Fender came over, and this was their pride and joy. I went to see them play one of their local gigs live, and I thought it was brilliant, and from that point onwards, I just wanted to be in a band, really. I suppose I must have been fifteen [when] I wondered into a classroom at school. I went to [a] school in St Albans called St Albans School, and there's this guy playing acoustic guitar, and I thought he sounded really good. That guy I didn't know, but it turned out to be Paul Atkinson, and I just walked up to him while I was waiting for my friend and said, uh, "You don't know me," you know, "My name's Rod. I'm really looking to start a band. I wonder if you'd be interested." He said, "Yeah, alright, OK." So I had a guitarist. Then I thought, "Right, now we need to get the other guys," so- one of my best friends at the time was a guy called Paul Arnold. I went to see Paul that evening, and I knew that he was building a bass guitar, and I also knew he couldn't play a note of any instrument and never had in his life, but I knew he was building a bass guitar, so I said, "Well, I know- how's the bass guitar going?" He said, "Well, you know, it's nearly finished." I said, "Great." I said, "Well, would you like to play it in a band?" He said, "Yeah, alright." He said, "I've got a friend who sings and plays a bit of guitar." He said, uh, "We could get him involved if you like," and I said, "Yeah, that sounds great. What's his name?" and he said, "Well, Colin Blunstone." I said, "OK," and I thought, "Right, what, what, what we need now is a drummer," so one of the things that we had at, at St Albans School was an army corps. I knew that on the Friday that was coming up they had their army corps day, so I stood outside while the army corps went by, and I looked for the guy who seemed to have the most rhythm playing the drums, side drum, and that was Hugh Grundy, so I, I collared him afterwards and said, um, "Would you like to be in a band?" He said, "Yeah, why not?" [I] said, "OK, first rehearsal, we'll meet outside the Blacksmith's Arms," which was a pub in, uh, St Albans, um, "next Friday evening seven, seven o'clock, OK?" "Yeah, alright." Now I had a band, but, uh, we had no instruments or no equipment, so I went to my cousin, Jim Rodford, and said, "Could we borrow all the Bluetones' equipment for this rehearsal." He very kindly organized all this. The Bluetones used to rehearse at a youth club called the Pioneer Youth Club, so we commandeered the Pioneer for the following Friday evening, met outside the Blacksmith's Arms, which was literally only two hundred yards away from the Pioneer Club, and we were away. Hugh set up the Bluetones' drum kit. There was a kick drum, you know, a snare, some cymbals, couple of tom toms, and it was extraordinary because within- because he had really natural coordination, within an hour I'd say, he could get the coordination of hands and feet together, and he could play simple drum fills, which was brilliant, really. Uh, I was really impressed with everybody. I mean, it was a real buzz, that first rehearsal, and it just all fell into place, and in fact, that became the Zombies apart from the bass player. I mean, that was the only change, and he was actually - to be fair to Paul - he was thinking at the time that he really wanted to be a doctor, you know? So he followed that route, and, um, we got in touch with Chris White, who became the bass player, but apart from that, that first rehearsal became the Zombies, and the combination of being very naïve, never having been in bands before, which gave us really quite a fresh way of looking at things, I think, and the incredible luck of everyone actually being talented was just brilliant.
The Most Exciting Time of All
The group actually did form in 1961, but there was a period of, obviously, quite a long time before we could actually get gigs, before we could actually, um, move forward. I mean, in a way, that was the most exciting time of all, of, you know, that I've had in music because the actual buzz of getting people together and suddenly even in the smallest way being part of this whole scene and with the Beatles first starting to open everything up was just brilliant. Like most bands, I think, we started playing covers, um, covers being other people's tunes. We had to get a set together, obviously. The first priority was to be able to play for at least forty-five minutes because without that, we couldn't get any gigs, so the first tunes that we would do would be Cliff Richard tunes, Shadows tunes, instrumentals, anything from Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis things, although I will say that we always looked for the more obscure Elvis things. We really rehearsed, I guess, for- you know, we just practiced, really, at a youth club in Hatfield, and in fact, it was next door to where one of the masters at my school lived, who hated rock and roll music, and we must have put him through hell, you know? His Sunday afternoons, his time of peace, you know, was a time of peace no more.
Eventually, we thought, "Well, we've, you know, we've been rehearsing and rehearsing; we've gotta try and get a gig." So Colin said, "Well, I play for my school rugby team. Um, they have a dance every month. It's got a dance band, but I might be able to persuade them that we get in the interval. It won't get us any money, but we might be able to play twenty minutes, you know, in the interval." We said, "Yeah, that'd be fantastic!" you know. So we trekked down to this, um, Old Verulamiums Rugby Club. The dance band finished their first set. There were maybe forty people there in the place. It was very quiet. And we set up our stuff, and we played, and it went down a storm, and it went so well in fact that they said, "Well, come and do it again next m- next month," which we did. The next month, there were maybe twice the amount of people there. There were about eighty people, and they said, "Well, this is great. Maybe we could set up a gig with just you playing as the, you know, the main band." We said, "Fantastic. We'll have to re-rehearse a lot more, you know." So we rehearsed some more, and they set up a gig for us a couple of months later, and we played, and there were, oh, maybe two hundred people there, which was great, and it was really started to get our reputation and atmosphere so much so that we played there, I reckon, for a- that was our main gig for a while, and over a period of maybe, I don't know, eighteen months, we built up that place, and in the end, they had to have a marquee attached to the place to get all the people in, and that was very exciting times actually, and then we started to play also, uh, my school's old boys' association, which was rugby club, which was called the OA's, and we played there, and we built up the same sort of thing there, and then obviously, we had to move out. We had to move to wider pastures, yeah.
I remember the first gig, which was quite frightening to do, was a local youth club. That went very well, and then we got the big chance, we thought, which was the St Albans Town Hall, to play back up for one of the famous semi-pro groups at the time. I can't even remember who they were. We got up there, and we had a local promoter who was coming to see us, to see how good we were. Now there were two new elements in the Town Hall gig. First of all, it was by far the biggest place we'd ever played, and we had no idea of the problems that bad acoustics can give you. Secondly, because the main- it was ages before the main band was on, there was nobody there, so there were about three people in the hall. [With] this huge, high ceiling, the sound threw us completely because it just sounded echo-y and thin, and the promoter was there, and we were, we were mortified. I mean, we thought it was awful. We thought it was just terrible, and we thought, "Well, he's the local promoter. He's not gonna give us any gigs," but for whatever reason, he saw through that, and he actually did give us a gig, one of the local sort of gigs, and he booked us on trust, you know, for a main thing. It was the Ballito Hosiery Mills, and we did a gig there, and it was fantastic. It was really good. It went down a storm, and we started becoming very popular on the live circuit. I think to the sort of chagrin of, of Jim, we ousted the Bluetones as the number one, um, group in the area, and we started really making a name for ourselves.
Creating Waves
We'd got to the point in our lives when we're now, you know, two and a half years further down the road. This now was 1963. We'd made a big name for ourselves locally, but a lot of the guys in the band - half the band, I'd say - thought of it just as a nice thing to do, and they wanted to get on with their careers. That meant to them thinking about university, whatever. It meant with me thinking about university as well, but I deliberately- I'd left school, and I deliberately applied too late to get into university that year because I thought what I really wanna do is be in the band and turn professional, and if anything- if I can make anything happen this year, I've got a year's grace before I then have to go [to] university so I can make the choice, you know, so.... Paul Atkinson was a year younger than me. He'd taken his A levels, and he got a place at university, and at this time, we were all thinking about, you know, breaking up, but the Herts Beat Competition- Hertfordshire was the county that St Albans is in, and this thing the Herts Beat Competition came up. We entered this, and Chris White and myself specifically entered this with the thought that it might be a way of persuading the others to turn professional. We didn't really organize support, but a fantastic thing happened - that from around the area, people really organized support, and we did this competition, and we had this fantastic sort of fans, of supporters that we hadn't really organized but were cheering for us. It was great, and we, we won our heat, and we won our heat playing a version we had of "Summertime," which was quite jazzy actually, much longer and jazzier than the orig- than the version that we finally put onto record. That sort of created waves, and actually we were offered a recording contract after the heat. One of the prizes for the final was, um, a recording contract with Decca, but in fact, we were offered the recording contract after the heat, before we were in the final. We went on to win the competition, which in a way is one of the most exciting nights of my life because the atmosphere was very heady, there were lots of people there, the support was fantastic, and, and we won, you know, and it's absolutely fantastic.
Early Decca
At that time, we were still doing covers, and in fact, all the things we did - as far as I remember - on the competition were cover versions of other people's songs, sometimes really heavily modified, um, into our own style, and certainly "Summertime" is like no other version of "Summertime" that I've ever heard, but by the time the Zombies were up and going, I'd written one song that we used to do in the act called "It's Alright with Me," which actually made it onto the first Zombies EP. Chris had written one or two things, but when we won the Beat Competition, we got the recording contract, and we were gonna record "Summertime" and release it as our first record. We actually recorded it with a couple of people, very nice couple of guys in music in this country called the Jackson Brothers, who were musicians themselves, had their own studio, but were also the sons of a, a quite prominent, older DJ in this country called Jack Jackson, and we recorded "Summertime," and Decca was gonna release that as our first single. It wasn't the version that finally ended up on the record. And then a friend of Chris's father who was in the music business, as a producer, as a, a musician, a writer, came to see us and said, "I think they're really talented," he said to his father, but he said, "I don't think you should rush into this first record, so I think you should get Decca to record them again in their own studios." He said, "I'd like to be considered to produce them, and I think they ought to write something themselves for the session." So with a complete sort of confidence and naïveté of youth, I thought- and with no knowledge at all of any of the pitfalls that happen along the way to getting a, a successful record, I thought, "Yeah! I can write something for the session, um, and it'll be better than most [of] the stuff that's around, and we'll rehearse it, and it'll sound great, and the recording will go great. It'll sound like a great record. It'll come out, and it'll be a hit all over the world," and it was! I mean, it was just ridiculous, really, and you know, you only get one shot at that because after you've recorded a couple times, you realize, you know, how the gods have to be in your favor for every aspect of the process to work, you know. I mean, the pitfalls [are] just enormous. The gods were smiling on us, and it actually did work, and Chris wrote, um for that session, too. He wrote "You Make Me Feel Good," which turned out to be the B-side of "She's Not There." At the time, that wasn't necessarily so at all. We were all knocked out with "She's Not There" and "You Make Me Feel Good," and so was the producer, and so was everybody else. And it was a real toss of a coin as to what was gonna be the first A-side - "You Make Me Feel Good" or "She's Not There." And in the end, the toss of the coin decided it was "She's Not There." Decca first of all weren't sure whether to release "She's Not There" or "You Make Me Feel Good." They were excited with the session. They were excited with the results, but you have to also remember at the time, Decca were the company which- this has been said a million times, I know, but they turned down the Beatles, and they were very scared at losing anything else, and they tended to take other people's excitement and, and opinion and run with it. Um, Ken Jones, the producer, was very excited about the session, so they went with it, but they were excited about it. They thought it was something very unusual. I think "cautiously excited" would be the- maybe the way to describe it.
She's Not There
"She's Not There" came out in the summer of '64 in England. It was an immediate hit. At the time, you know- what you have to remember is that the whole radio set up was extremely restricted in those days. In England, there were no, um, all-day radio stations playing pop music. There were one or two outlets. As far as I can remember, there were maybe a couple of hours a week on radio that played pop music, and there were two television programs as I recall at the time, when "She's Not There" came out. One was [a] thing called Juke Box Jury, which was watched religious by the nation's youth, you know, but at the same time, the panel on it tended to be celebrities and people that often looked down on pop music. We were lucky enough that weekend it came out to get our record played on that. It was only played for twenty-five seconds, and then the panel made up their mind. The Juke Box Jury made up their mind on it. And the other- yeah, Ready Steady Go was going. That was the other main one, as far as I remember. To stand a chance, really, you had to get your record on those two shows, and we were lucky enough to do that. We were also lucky enough to have a jury that week which at least in part was quite hip. I don't remember all the members, but I do remember that George Harrison was on it, and I remember being so excited because he loved it, you know. "She's Not There" came on, and George Harrison loved it, which- the Beatles were gods to me at the time. I mean, they still are to some extent, but I mean at, at that age, you know, they, they were really gods. They were opening up the whole world, you know.
British Invasion
Obviously the first stage that we had that was part of the dream coming true, which was brilliant, was the recording being released and being an immediate hit in this country. That was, that was great. I was fantastically excited that it was a hit in America. I mean, it was just unbelievable to think that we could - an English band from St Albans - could be climbing up the charts to America. It was a complete dream. It was wonderful, but I did expect it because I couldn't see any other course, you know. My eyes were blind to anything happening that wasn't just this ridiculous dream, you know, and in the early part of our careers, it happened. I mean, later, you know, we were brought up with a rude shock, but first of all, that, that's the way it did happen. By Christmas that year [1964], we were booked to go over in America. "She's Not There" had been number one in Cashbox, two in Billboard, and we were booked on to the Murray the K show, at the Brooklyn Fox. We were playing six or eight shows a day. I can't remember what- six, I think, starting at eight o'clock in the morning and going through till sort of ten [or] eleven at night. We only did two numbers 'cause there were a lot of acts on the show, but at the time- we were on reasonably early in the show, and the way Murray the K worked it is that when you'd done your spot, you didn't go off into your dressing room; you went to the back of the stage and formed a sort of chorus that danced about, sort of kick your legs around to the other acts or some of the other acts. I mean, absolutely extraordinary. So it was a mixed experience for me, but what was wonderful was actually hearing and getting to know firsthand the black groups that were on the show that sounded like heaven to me. Patti LaBelle was on the show. At the time, it was Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, and they- and their whole scene was doing things like "Danny Boy." It's extraordinary, uh- things for them to be doing, sort of Irish, big Irish songs or, or big numbers that ended with huge climaxes but weren't soully at all, but obviously, they had wonderful voices, and their heritage was the black church and soul, and Chuck Jackson was the headliner, even though we'd had a number one. There's no question: Chuck Jackson was, was the big hit in New York, and his big song at the time was "Since I Don't Have You." He'd get to the part where it's "I don't have love to bring," and then he'd just stop, and the whole audience would sing the chorus. It was wonderful. And the black acts on the show, which included Dionne Warwick, Ben E. King, the Drifters, Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, they would sing improvised back-ups offstage, and he'd go, "I don't have anything," and they'd sing, "Anything, anything." Ah, and it was great!
Scissors
But in general, it started to get very exciting, I will say, and, and there was a measure of adulation, and we did start to get a measure of that sort of Beatles experience whereby you couldn't venture out of the hotel without having people running after you. You'd have the sometimes quite frightening experiences of, of girls running after you with scissors because the great thing then was to try and get a lock of hair, you know. When you had scissors waving at you, you know, it could be pretty frightening, actually.
Tell Her No vs. Leave Me Be
It is true that "Tell Her No" came out in America before [it came out in] the U.K. because what happened- we did the follow-up session, and we were actually recording "Tell Her No." While we were actually recording that, a phone call came through from America. It was late at night because of the time change and everything, you know, and someone walked in and said, "It's Al Gallico on phone," who- and Al was the, uh, publisher in America, dear old Al. He was on the phone saying "She's Not There"s number one, you know, so it was this really, you know, it- you- it couldn't have been scripted better in a film, you know. I mean it really is like one of the early Elvis films. You know, you cut the record, and it's out. The next day it's number one, you know. But anyway, we were recording "Tell Her No," and "She's Not There" was number one. On the same session that we recorded "Tell Her No," um, we recorded several other tracks, and, and one of those tracks was "Leave Me Be," Chris White's song, which was to become our second single in England. Now, I must say there were two things that strike me about that. One is that none of us really thought that that was the obvious single from the session, but the producer Ken and the record company felt it was, and one of the reasons they thought - this is the second point - one of the reasons they thought that it was- when we recorded the first session, with "She's Not There" and the other songs, we just went in there. We wanted to be exciting, and we just wanted to do a good reading of the songs and make a great record. People looked at things in a more calculated way for the second session. We didn't, but Ken and the record company - but particularly Ken, I think - thought, "What is it that's made 'She's Not There' successful?" and in his mind, it was Colin's breathy vocals. Now, Colin's vocals were certainly one of the things that made that record very successful, but the breathiness was natural, and it wasn't artificially highlighted. On the second session, particularly on "Leave Me Be," Ken tried to really emphasize the breathiness of Colin's vocal, so instead of the ingredients being natural, they were artificially emphasized, I think. There might have been a way we could have made it, you know, stronger, but nevertheless, I don't think that was the natural second single, and it, and it flopped here, and then they released "Tell Her No" in this country, and "Tell Her No" was a hit but a very small one. It only reached number thirty, but it was the second, follow-up single in America, and of course, it was a top-five single in America, too, and I remember doing a tour with- the tour that we did in America after the Murray the K show was a Dick Clark tour, which was also great, and we linked up with another tour that was going around, and we- Little Anthony was on that tour, you know, whose record "Going out of My Head" was one of my absolute favorites, you know. Again, that was a, a knock-out moment because he came up to me and said, "Oh, man, 'Tell Her No,' that's, that's my song, you know. I love it."
Frustrations
Well, I mean, I suppose the impact on, on the chemistry of the group, of all the initial success and everything- I think with the Zombies, it was basically very positive, at least- [the] thing was: we, we were together for three years maybe from our inception to the time we turned professional, and that was a great time, but then we were only together for three years. The impact of the early professional success, I think, was basically positive, although all the touring meant I don't think either Chris or I really wrote while we were on the road, and all the touring meant that the actual emphasis gets changed from the more creative side of things. You might be doing one gig a week in the semi-pro days, and that's pretty close to home, and you're spending a lot of the time listening to records, being very enthusiastic, writing. The emphasis changes more to considerations of live stuff, and in a way, that happens with everybody, and that's slightly detrimental. At the same time, we were writing, and we thought we were still writing good stuff all the time. I remember one particular song we had that everyone thought was gonna be a hit, here and in America, called "Whenever You're Ready," which did nothing, which did nothing anywhere, and we thought that was a pretty good record, and we thought a lot of the records were pretty good, and generally, after "She's Not There" and "Tell Her No," which were two very big hits, over the next two years, things started to slide, really. We had one in America called "She's Coming Home," which was a top fifty hit. It wasn't a major hit, and it was very frustrating, and, and the frustrations, really, of the hits not continuing to come were what more than anything had a, an impact on the chemistry of the group because then you start to look outside and say, "Well, maybe we should start doing covers." We did a Dee Dee Warwick song called "Gotta Get a Hold of Myself." We did "Going out of My Head." We even did a cover of "My Girl," which I'd heard by the Temptations in America [and] loved, and that Temptations record wasn't a hit in England, and we'd come back and started to do, like, a harmony cover of their version, and as we come away from the recording session, we heard Otis Redding's version here, so, I mean, you know, we had to forget about that, but basically, um, it was the frustrations, really, that, that caused the impact on the chemistry of the group, but there was another thing, and that was also- I mean, I, I've done a lot of production recently, and I've had some success, and I realize all the problems involved with production, so I'm not putting Ken Jones down at all when I say this. I actually think he was a very talented producer, but the way we looked at things at the time, we felt that Ken was putting a particular slant on our records, and he was tryin' all the time to emphasize the breathiness, etc. We felt that live we had more meat and excitement about what we were doing, and we wanted to try and capture some of that. Rightly or wrongly, that was the way we were looking at things at the time, so that was a niggle that we had, and then after only three years professionally, we decided to break up, and one of the reasons at the time was that Colin particularly was a bit disillusioned with the lifestyle of a professional musician. That was one of the reasons. Anyway, we broke up, and Chris and I went to CBS and said, "We would like to produce an album ourselves before we break up," and they very kindly gave us a thousand pounds to do this, and we produced Odessey and Oracle, um, from which "Time of the Season" came.
Time of the Season
Now, I always had a really good feeling about "Time of the Season." It was something that I'd written quickly. We'd done it very quickly in the studio, without really rehearsing it. We'd done lots of, um, takes of it, but I mean, we hadn't rehearsed it for days. I played it to the guys- by that time, the group was so disillusioned with everything that it was Chris and I that were really keeping their enthusiasm going. I mean, I remember working with Colin on the vocal because he hadn't really heard it. I, I just was teaching him as we were going along, and I remember at one point Colin saying- because really he was just thinking about leaving then, and he was saying, "Look, you sing it," and I said, "Oh, come on, Colin," you know. You know, "It, it sounds, sounds great," you know. "You sound great. Come on, please," and he said, "Yeah, OK," and, and, but you know, it was that sort of feeling about it, but I had a really good feeling about that when, when we made it. I thought it sounded great. It was the one track on the album that Geoff Emerick, who'd had a lot of success with the Beatles, had, had engineered, too. It got released over here, but it almost didn't get released in America because they didn't think it was commercial, and they didn't think it was as commercial as the other stuff that we'd been doing up to then, and then Al Kooper just happened to hear it and fell in love with it and took it home. At the time, he was making a lot of impact on American music, Al Kooper who had a lot, lot of success with Blood, Sweat, and Tears, for instance, and [Mike] Bloomfield. He was a noted session guy. He'd done all the stuff with, with [Bob] Dylan. He was someone that CBS really took a lot of notice of at the time. He went back to America and said, "You've just gotta release this record. You're crazy if you don't release this record." So they released it. We then broke up as it was being released. "Time of the Season" was about the fourth or fifth single released from that. They thought that two or three other things were more commercial, and they released those. As a last gasp, almost as an afterthought in America, they released "Time of the Season." Didn't do anything, and in fact, it was six months before there was one radio station in America who stuck with it because they were getting a lot of feedback on it and wouldn't stop playing it, and it gradually, gradually spread from there, really, really clawed its way into the American radio scene, and then when it reached a critical point, it, it then exploded and took off, and again in, in one chart was number one in America, and Billboard probably didn't quite make it number one.
Don't Look Back
It was recorded in 1967 in England and then came out in England by the time all the other things had been released. It was '69 before it finally made it in America, so it took all that time. By that time, we were- I was tryin' to form Argent. We got all sorts of, um, ridiculous offers to get back together for one tour, lots and lots of money, but you know, I've always felt, and, you know, Chris particularly agreed with me at the time, I think, you know, you don't look back. All the success I'd had at that time had been from enthusiasm and been through enthusiasm causing me to do things that I loved and, and to move forward in those areas, and that's, that's what seemed right to me at the time.
Diamonds Are Forever
People talking 'bout the Zombies, it's extraordinary, particularly in America, and it continues to knock me out. I mean, e- even stuff that I'm doing now- I've just finished producing an album in America for Jules Shear. Did that at Woodstock a few months, my colleague Pete Van Hooke and myself, and it, it was just extraordinary because George knew just about every note on all the Zombies stuff. 'bout the second day I was there in Woodstock, I wandered into- I can't remember the name of it; it's a pretty famous café in Woodstock that Bob Dylan used to play at. I'd guess the average age of people in there was like, you know, twenties maybe, and as I walked in, the jukebox was playing "She's Not There" by the Zombies, and I thought, "This is, this is just ridiculous," and I never ever go to America without hearing "Time of the Season" or "Tell Her No" or "She's Not There," you know, within a couple of days of being there on some radio station. It seems to get moreso, and, and kids, you know, of, of just out of their teens and know these things, you know, know them so well, and that really does knock me out.
